Tuesday, 12 October 2010

...And All The Way Up

As a human being, I find in myself also a tendency to believe that I am more or less in the middle of things - in the middle of the universe, in the middle of the size scale, in the middle of whatever developmental spiral might exist in life.

Yet if Einstein got anything right, it was his blinding truth that no one is privileged. No one at all. You might think that the universe extends outwards from where you stand - but it looks exactly that way for everyone, wherever they are standing.

Everywhere is the Centre (and the Centre is Everywhere).

When we consider fractals, we tend to think of them repeating their pattern ad infinitum, to the smaller and smaller scale. This seems to be true. But what is obviously also true, therefore, is that the Pattern repeats at larger and larger scales, also ad infinitum. We're not in the middle, we're just somewhere along the continuum.

That's why I have, in the past, grappled with the topic of vegetarianism.

In her penetrating post, Hecate explains why, to certain people, eating of the vegetable kingdom contains all of the ethical issues that attend on meat eating. It is, indeed, so for me. From the moment, more or less, when I became aware that plantscould, you know, make an effort and convince me of their consciousness - and that moreover I was not the only one who was being or had been communicated with - from that moment I knew that any qualms I held about eating animal flesh were just as valid when applied to eating anything at all.

For we're all in this, together. I'm not even stretching the truth to make a point when I say that the weed by the roadside, the crumb of granite rolling on the pavement, the motes of illuminated air dancing in the evening streetlights, the very quarks themselves - all partake of this consciousness which builds and destroys, eats and is eaten. I'm part of the process. My body is, and will be, food. It is food right now for milliard mites and bacteria. Any woman who has born a child (and most who have not) are in no doubt that they are food, too.
When I die, I expect to be food for insects and worms and single-celled organisms. I eat animals as well as plants because I do not distinguish between their levels of consciousness - indeed, I feel that distinguishing in such a way may be only what we humans tend to do.

What if, as I have had intimations of before, this whole deal is not divided into scales, spirals of development, boundaries of meaning, but is rather one infinite, indivisible, nondual Being?

World without end upward and downward, too. More turtles -or, as Hecate is fond of saying, it's all just Goddess pouring Goddess into Goddess, and it never actually ends. Although our scientific materialism is having a hard time with the concept of no-boundaries, this is probably just precisely the underlying truth they're mostly missing out on. You can't take hold of it - you're marinating in it.